Is culture stagnating because of AI?

An interesting experiment from the journal Patterns details an experiment scientists conducted with self-referential loops similar to those used to power AI (in this experiment: image-text-image-text...). The findings reveal (to no one's surprise) that without outside intervention "autonomous AI feedback loops naturally drift toward common attractors — very generic-looking images, which we call 'visual elevator music.'"

Logically, this makes sense. When you remove the poets, painters, writers and artists from the system - the very ones that challenge the status quo, that see beauty in new places, that call attention to the out-of-the-ordinary - the system moves to the center of the normal curve.

This isn't just a case of keeping humans in the loop. It seems there's a need for humans to disrupt and redefine the loop. And it seems that this disruption is a feature that we're at risk of losing as AI increasingly defines cultural guideposts.

As Ahmed Elgammal (Rutgers University professor of computer science) writes, "it’s yet another piece of evidence that generative AI may already be inducing a state of 'cultural stagnation.'"